
The Airshell Prototype
This paper by Alessandro Liuti, Sofia Colabella, and Alberto Pugnale, presents the construction of Airshell, a small timber gridshell prototype erected by employing a pneumatic formwork.
ARCHITECTURE AND SECOND DIGITAL TURN
Thirty years after the advent of digital, it is mandatory a reflection that looks at the mutations produced by digital technology in society and therefore within the architectural design process.
To face the complexity, I chose a holistic approach, capable of acquiring a philosophical perspective, and descending towards the technical, operational, methodological, instrumental and relational detail.
This research aims to identify what effects the implementation of digital technology has on society and our different perception of space.
It Define the contribution made by those precursors of themes, methods, and processes that laid the foundation so that approaches developed today may flourish through the aid of computers, by comparing their thinking to that of contemporary theorists and designers.
This study Identify new demands affecting architecture in terms of requirements, metrics, and project materials, by investigating to what extent these changes are the result of progressive digitization in architecture, and what responsibilities they pose to us regarding our role.
The research path chosen stems from the observation of contemporary society from which the project develops as a response to human needs.
A society that is confronted today with a condition of liquid modernity, which I reconstruct starting from the post-World War II period, highlighting the changes in scale, the new speed of connection, the disintegration of social structures, the different role of work, and the race towards individualism.
Factors recognized among others by Baumann, Castells and Augè, and which find fertile ground on the digital dimensions that have caught up with our lives, stealing value from space and time, and fostering social distances and the emergence of myxophobia.
What most distinguishes Frei Otto, one of the most recognized precursors of digital architectural thinking, is undoubtedly his approach to architectural design.
We will follow his diverse architectural design philosophy starting from his interest in lightweight structures, which would lead him to study the relationship between architectural forms and the processes of generation of natural forms.
Forms that he would design thanks to physical models: computers ante litteram, precursors of digital form-finding methods.
His thought on the relationship between technical methods and nature, incredibly similar to the Greek one, corresponds to a declared necessity for a new type of architectural truthfulness.
With the rediscovery of complexity and contradiction, evident both in the thinking and in the works of Venturi, a cultural change took place, which for years involved important architects all over the world.
The diverse approach to the relationship with communication created by the movement heightened with Deconstructivism.
Starting from Derridian deconstruction, it evolved along a path which was even considered controversial, approaching digital both from a methodological and instrumental point of view: a phenomenon that can be pieced together in the thinking and the works of Eisenmann, and the projects of Gehry and Hadid.
The first digital turn, recognized by Carpo, is described here not as a current or a movement, but rather as a moment of change due to the implementation of new tools, and in a different approach to architectural design characterized by the themes of continuity and variation.
This new orientation can be seen clearly in both in Lynn’s smoothness, as in Stan Allen’s field conditions, in the participatory experiments of Frazer and Cache, in the Yokohama port terminal project by Foreign Office Architects, and in the advent of Parametricism.
This paper by Alessandro Liuti, Sofia Colabella, and Alberto Pugnale, presents the construction of Airshell, a small timber gridshell prototype erected by employing a pneumatic formwork.
In this paper by Gregory Charles Quinn, Chris J K Williams, and Christoph Gengnagel, a detailed comparison is carried out between established as well as novel erection methods for strained grid shells by means of FE simulations and a 3D-scanned scaled physical model in order to evaluate key performance criteria such as bending stresses during erection and the distance between shell nodes and their spatial target geometry.
In this paper by Frederic Tayeb, Olivier Baverel, Jean-François Caron, Lionel du Peloux, ductility aspects of a light-weight composite gridshell are developed.
In this paper by Julian Lienhard, Holger Alpermann, Christoph Gengnagel and Jan Knippers structures that actively use bending as a self forming process are reviewed.
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